The emergence of altruism as a social norm

Abstract

Expectations, exerting influence through social norms, are a very strong candidate to explain how complex societies function. In the Dictator game (DG), people expect generous behavior from others even if they cannot enforce any sharing of the pie. Here we assume that people donate following their expectations, and that they update their expectations after playing a DG by reinforcement learning to construct a model that explains the main experimental results in the DG. Full agreement with the experimental results is reached when some degree of mismatch between expectations and donations is added into the model. These results are robust against the presence of envious agents, but affected if we introduce selfish agents that do not update their expectations. Our results point to social norms being on the basis of the generous behavior observed in the DG and also to the wide applicability of reinforcement learning to explain many strategic interactions.

RNA-Binding Proteins in Cancer: Functional and Therapeutic Perspectives

“…In non-small-cell lung carcinoma and thyroid cancer cells, CMLD-2 treatment decreases the mRNA expression of HuR or competitively binds to HuR, and thereby downregulates target mRNAs, such as Bax , Bcl-xL , and Mad2 . CMLD-2 treatment therefore increases apoptosis and decreases tumor aggressiveness [ 213 , 214 ].…”

Revisiting the impact of impure public goods on consumers’ prosocial behavior: A lab experiment in Shanghai

“…The possible implication might be that the participants behave slightly more altruistically to offset the crowding out effect, which results in the mental accounting being incomplete. Moreover, the recent studies on expectation in donation issues (e.g., Brañas‐Garza, Rodríguez‐Lara, & Sánchez, 2017; Pereda, Brañas‐Garza, Rodríguez‐Lara, & Sánchez, 2017) might be utilized to partly interpret why the participants behaved slightly more altruistically. Since the purpose of the SHUEDF is to help students and support university development, the participants might set an expectation of how much they could benefit from the SHUEDF, which possibly serves as a potential factor affecting participants’ voluntary donations.…”

Altruism and information

“…This result would imply that social image is stronger for Women. Moreover, Women may be aware of the fact that they are more generous than Men (see Eckel and Grossman, 2001) and that they are expected to be more generous (Aguiar et al, 2010, Branas-Garza et al 2018, and pursuing that social norm they react more to information disclosure than Men (Pereda et al, 2017).…”